EMBRACE Collaborators Meeting
The EMBRACE study held a collaborators meeting on Monday 30th January 2023 in Cambridge. Around 40 participants joined the meeting in person and another 15 participated online. These included representatives from recruiting centres, researchers and the EMBRACE team.
During the meeting there were presentations on the research achievements of the EMBRACE study since its initiation in 1998. There was an overview of the latest findings on the lifestyle, hormonal, reproductive and other modifiers of risk, as well an overview of the current knowledge on genetic modifiers or risk, and how all these are now being used in randomised controlled trials to provide personalised cancer risks for BRCA1 and BRCA2 carriers.
EMBRACE has received funding from Cancer Research UK for the period 2022-27 and there was a presentation of the research objectives for the next 5 years.
A representative from our patient and public engagement panel talked about her medical journey since her cancer diagnosis and since finding out that she carried a PALB2 mutation. She highlighted her views on how access to genetic services and screening could be improved.
There were also presentations from representatives from three recruiting centres who shared their experience with recruitment of EMBRACE study participants, what works well in practice and what the key challenges are in recruitment.
Finally, there was an extensive discussion among all participants on the key unresolved questions in the clinical management and care of carriers of mutations in breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility genes that EMBRACE could help address and in particular how to increase the diversity of study participants.
(30th January 2023)